The Last Day

by Andrew Hunter Murray

  The house itself took five minutes to find. Twice David had to slow and turn the car around, and both times became fearful, swiveling his head back and forth so his good eye could survey as many houses as possible. It was only on the third pass, right on the outskirts of the village, that Hopper spotted the second word the warden had written, painted on a slate tile hanging outside a gate. Lambsfoot. It was almost the farthest house out. Across the road from it stood the tree line, silent and menacing.

  “Don’t leave the car right outside,” she said.

  David nodded, although the tiny subterfuge could hardly do them any good, and parked a little along the road. Hopper left her bag—with the transmitter and the photograph—on the back seat.

  By the time they had reached the house’s porch, they were soaked; it took effort, once in from the rain, to leave the shelter and walk the outside of the house, inspecting it for signs of life. It was a perfectly ordinary double-fronted brick home, two stories high. The front garden was scrubby and pebble-strewn. Behind the house, the forest had grown up to the door, and above the rain she heard branches scraping the windows in the breeze. There was nothing visible through the trees. As they moved around, David smiled lopsidedly. “Nobody home.”

  Back at the front door, Hopper had to resist the urge to knock. One of the front windows had been smashed by weather or vandals, and she gingerly placed her hand through the glass, reached around to the latch, and eased the door open.

  The house had been closed up in good order. The ground floor held the hall, a kitchen, two small parlors, and a locked room. In one parlor, the furniture was half covered in dust sheets, but they stopped halfway across, as if the placer had been distracted mid-departure.

  “I’ll look upstairs,” David said. “Check there’s definitely nobody home.”

  The locked room had the key still in the door. Hopper turned it with difficulty, and it opened onto a low-ceilinged study, its height reduced further in places by heavy wooden beams. Unlike the rest of this floor, it had no dust sheets. It was simply furnished, with a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and a large empty bookcase, but it looked as though it could have been closed up just yesterday. An image occurred to her: that of a burial chamber, the last resting place of a long-dead king.

  The surface of the desk was bare, except for a heavy brass stapler, oddly shiny in the dull house. She looked through the cabinet; it was empty. The desk was not. The first drawer contained a handful of paper litter. The second held another few discarded letters.

  The only other objects in the whole desk were in the second drawer down on the right-hand side: a hard block wrapped in black plastic, and a yellowed envelope bearing the words Joshua. 02.09.44.

  “David?” He appeared within a few seconds.

  “Nothing upstairs. The roof’s gone in one room, it smells completely . . .” He fell silent as she gestured at the envelope. “Joshua?”

  “His son. But he was long dead by the time this was written.” She opened the note, as dry as parchment, almost fallen into three pieces along the folds, and began to read.

  Dear Joshua,

  You are a more than worthy son to an inadequate father. The generation above yours was a failure. We found no answers. I suspect there were none to be found. And yet the ways in which we failed were our choices, so they are now our responsibility.

  You have been born in the shadow of a great misery. Your own survival means everything to me. None of this is just as well; none of it is for the best. Good luck.

  Your father

  “What was the date again?”

  “September 2044.”

  He gestured. “Let’s see it.”

  It was heavy, the block, and sealed all the way around with black binding tape, too thick to tear.

  “Keys.”

  He dug in a pocket and pulled out his keys, handing her a sharp one. For a second, she saw the men in the woods approaching her, not thinking they needed a weapon.

  She nicked the edge of the packaging, ran the sharp key steadily along one edge. “Careful.” She couldn’t tell if he’d said it or she had. Inside, there was paper, sandwiched between two thick sheets of balsa wood. There must have been three hundred sheets. She lifted off the top layer of wood and read the title: Report of the first operational flight of the JAT satellite, dispatched 19/06/44.

  She breathed out slowly. “Jesus. We were right, David.”

  The title was followed by an elegant line drawing of the satellite, the same one the group had been posing in front of in the photo she had found in Thorne’s house.

  There were pages of technical specifications at first, dozens of them. Then a little passage dealing with the project objectives. (He had once said to her: “Never a mission. Always a project. Missionaries take their own beliefs with them. The Spanish Armada was a mission. Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle was a project.”)

  Objective. To lay the foundation for a new satellite network for governmental use. The JAT will be the first of a projected fifteen satellites, beginning to replace the GPS networks of the century’s early decades. The potential rewards are enormous.

  This project is an internal matter for the Department of the Interior and as such should be reported nowhere else. The aim is to secure civilian benefits before military ones. If the Department of Internal Security were notified, the JAT’s use might spread beyond the initial planned applications in ways disadvantageous to the successful completion of the project. This lies within the department’s budget and remit, and there is no specific duty to report it. Only six senior members have worked on this: Hollis, Drabble, Lee, Gethin, Symons, and the author.

  “So it was a secret from everyone. Even from the rest of the department. And definitely from Davenport.” David was reading by her side, their backs to the window.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Davenport couldn’t strap a weapon onto it if Thorne had already sent it up.” She read on, passing him each page as she finished.

  Launches. The first unsuccessful launch—of three—took place on 22/04/44. The launch point was sited on the Suffolk coast, in an area sufficiently remote to avoid detection. The forest just inland from the Walberswick marshlands proved an adequate site, but the vertical trajectory had been misprogrammed, and after ascending to a height of approximately 2,800 feet, the rocket leveled and crashed into the sea.

  The next launch took place in the same location and suffered its own different malfunctions, failing on the platform (necessitating hasty removal and disposal). The third launch made it into orbit, but a failure of communications halfway through the launch procedure rendered it useless. The final, successful launch did not occur until 19/06.

  There were more details, pages of numbers, ballistics information, solar-radiation defense strategies, mapped and rejected trajectories.

  By the time of the fourth attempt, official interest had been piqued by those who had observed the two launches to leave the ground. Internal Security reports were looking for the parties responsible—then suspected to be separatists planning an attack of some kind—and secrecy was of the utmost importance.

  The final site for a launch was in North Wales, close to the coast. The coastal location was, as usual, to help with possible disposal in the event of an urgent need to destroy evidence.

  Hopper pictured the men and women in Thorne’s photo standing on the hills near the sea, constructing their rudimentary tower under cover of woodland, unloading the meager supply of bartered and stolen fuel for the attempted launch of this one small box.

  The launch was successful. The solar battery Drabble installed should last several decades; the decryption key at the front of this document is what allowed me to decipher the satellite’s data and print this report.

  She flicked to the first page and saw it: a long string of letters and numbers. “It’s still up t
here, David. It could still be working now.”

  Observations

  Once successfully launched, the first pass of the JAT revealed nothing unexpected. It orbited almost in line with the Greenwich Meridian, along a path that took it directly over Britain, south through France and down over Africa, before it eventually plunged into darkness on the other side of the Earth. Thankfully, it survived its first pass, and then made its way around the Earth, sending information as it did so to a secure receiver in our department.

  The JAT moved slowly across the planet, taking photographs at twelve-second intervals, which allowed us to assess the whole planet’s surface without any gaps.

  The images of our surviving side of the Earth, transmitted from the satellite, were expected but nevertheless extraordinary. The spread of the Sahara Desert south and west has been even faster than we had projected. Across the lower half of Africa, vast swaths of formerly tropical area have died off completely. Curiously, there has been some resilience at the southern edge, and forests have grown across the Kalahari region. Huge algal blooms have arisen in the South Atlantic: the implications for oxygen supply are dealt with elsewhere. These observations were of interest, but they are nothing compared to what was found on the cold side of the Earth.

  As the JAT moved east across the former United States, it took a series of photos that revealed human activity. It is not easy to write these words. We counted twelve areas, scattered across the region, and eight larger sites in Asia, all appearing to sustain human life.

  For a second Hopper could not quite support her weight, and would have crumpled had she not been leaning against Thorne’s desk. She read the paragraph again, a third time, almost held back from understanding by the scale of the idea. She passed it to David. “This can’t be.”

  As he read it, his eyes widened, and he looked to her. “It’s not possible. There’s no way they could have survived. They can’t have.” He looked appalled.

  She turned the page, and there, against a black background, was a photo—a filigree of lights, spread out across the entire page. There were dozens of images of the various sites, taken at different times and from different angles, some from a distance, some zoomed in close enough that the bulbs had flared into miniature stars. But all showed the same thing. Lights. Life.

  She turned to the next page of text and read on.

  These settlements were the only ones with lights appearing visible to our satellite. It is possible that others survive in subterranean environments, with no indications above the surface of the Earth.

  In the years of the Slow, the United States of America was one of the few nations equipped with the resources to salvage a small core of population internally, while simultaneously arranging the largest planned migration in human history. One of the others was China. Both countries would naturally have made alternative arrangements should all the planned evacuations have failed in their mission. In the early years of the Slow, the USA retained the organisational ability required to keep this project secret, and the enormous manpower to make its new sites a reality. China’s own remarkable infrastructural abilities would have provided that nation with a substantial advantage too.

  On receiving these first images, the satellite’s course was altered from the ground to make further passes and analyse these areas more closely. It was possible that these lights might have remained on after the inhabitants of the city had been evacuated—in short, that the lights had survived and the inhabitants had not. Later analysis of the photos showed the pattern had changed substantially between batches of photographs being taken. The heat signatures the satellite detected moved in patterns too unpredictable to be a dead system. This was, and is, human habitation.

  There were more pages after that, more close-up photographs, detailed annotations suggesting possible functions, circles around possible power sources or waste outputs. Then another composite shot of the whole Coldside from the air, a dark orb spotted with gleaming lights, looking like a constellation of stars hanging alone in the night sky.

  Hopper turned to the chapter’s final page.

  Based on pre-Slow city estimates (accrued from photos of night climates and approximate populations), I would estimate the conurbations hold some tens of millions of individuals. Obviously, if they go underground (as the author suspects they would, for reasons of heat preservation), the populations might be substantially higher.

  Hopper remembered the bodies on the boat, and wondered afresh where they were from. Had they been making their way from the darkness to the light?

  “It can’t be. It can’t. How would they eat?” David said.

  “We don’t know what kind of supplies they had on that side. Or built up. There must be something there . . . I don’t know, tidal power, nuclear power, they could generate heat, grow hydroponically . . .” Hopper tailed off.

  “So this means . . .”

  “There are survivors. Jesus, David, there are . . .” She looked at the papers blurrily. “Christ, there are people out there. And they’re alive. Or they were fifteen years ago. They might well still be.” It felt suddenly far too warm in the room. Her throat was dry. The rain hammered and hammered on the window.

  “But why wouldn’t they make contact?”

  “We don’t know they didn’t try.”

  “Are they still alive?”

  She shrugged. “If there were millions alive fifteen years after the Stop, why not?”

  “Why didn’t Davenport just have Thorne killed?”

  “Look.”

  She had been leafing as they spoke. At the back was a sheet of paper in a different size, and not typed—handwritten.

  Teddy, my friend,

  I feel great sorrow that we will not be able to complete our task together. But you will understand your position is untenable. A rift has opened in the trust between us now, and I will have to continue alone. But I have happy memories of the work we did together. Your efforts will not go to waste.

  This place, this wonderful island, this precious stone, is the world’s last hope, and the best. All I need is a little more time, as I think you know. But if you upset the scale now, our whole mission here could fail. And I know I can make it succeed—with a few more years of toil, with the mission we have been blessed to complete.

  This is the only place that can survive. And I confess, Teddy, it could not cope with the images you have sent me. So I repeat: let me do my work, and keep the things you value safe.

  With fondest love,

  RD

  “So that’s why he was sacked,” David said. “And why he couldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Maybe he bought Davenport’s line,” Hopper said. “Or maybe he couldn’t bring himself to carry out a course that might tear the country apart.”

  She remembered Thorne’s face in the hospital bed, just a few days ago, and how relieved he had been to see her, and she realized how alone he must have been, and how unsure of himself. He had spent fifteen years not telling anyone, through fear, or misplaced loyalty. But he had realized what he ought to do, almost at the very end, and tried to pass it on. And when Fisher had failed him, he had turned to her.

  David picked up the pile of papers again, leafed through the documents. “Heat signatures . . . theories on how they feed themselves . . .” He held up one full-page photo and squinted closely at it, then placed it back.

  “Wait.” A possibility was dawning in Hopper’s mind. “I think this makes sense of what you were talking about yesterday. Davenport’s plan for the Americans.”

  David looked up. “You mean the deal?”

  “Yes. You said it would involve Davenport gaining the American”—she could hardly say the words—“their nuclear weapons.”

  “You think . . .”

  “Why else would he want them? You said it yourself. As soon as he gets them, he could use them, or as many as he needs to. On
the Coldside.”

  “He wouldn’t. He’d have to be mad.”

  “Why not? He carried out one genocide thirty years ago. He must have been negotiating to get these weapons for decades. He must spend all his time worrying that the survivors on that side will arrive over here, or the truth will come out somehow.”

  “And this way there would be nobody left to arrive.”

  “Exactly. And once the Americans are folded in here, he can begin the process of expanding back onto their continent, if he wants. What’s to stop him? They must have enough natural resources to keep this place going for centuries.”

  “Jesus.” David looked sick. She felt it, could taste a knot of bile rising in her own throat. He went on. “What do we do?”

  “What if this was published?” Hopper said.

  “That there are cities alive on the Coldside, surviving? That the American government colluded with the British to abandon millions of their own people? Jesus, that parts of China survived? And that these people might be still alive now? Still surviving?”

  “Yes. What would happen? To Davenport? His cabinet?”

  “The Americans would riot. They’d never hand over the nukes. The merger would fall apart. And Davenport . . . I don’t know. The whole Davenport project is based on the idea that we’re the world’s last hope; that’s why we’ll put up with everything. And now . . . we’re not.”

  Hopper looked at the thick parcel of papers, spilling out of the shiny plastic encasing it, and felt a sudden, crazy pang of tenderness for it. She leaned over and smoothed down a corner. “It feels like the whole country would go up if this came out. Who would replace him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s still worth doing.”

  “I’m not saying it’s not.”

  Hopper looked down at the bundle, and remembered Thorne’s words to her, fifteen years ago: I have tried to find ways to atone. But he hadn’t acted on them until he was on his deathbed. “Could you print this?”